Just last night, after a night’s worth of work on BQL, I turned and looked at Brade and asked “do you think we will get more than 20 attempts this week?”. His response was that he felt it was unlikely. I tended to agree with him. However, when I woke up this morning, and began poking about in my usual morning routine, I saw it screamed from a number of places: Limited Attempts on Normal Mode ICC bosses have been removed.

I will get to my thoughts on their removal in a minute, but before I did that I wanted to point out a comment from the blue post that I find intriguing: ” especially since the Heroic difficulty has been unlocked by a significant number of raids.” Why do I find this intriguing? Because the last time I checked 25 man progress, only somewhere around 15 guilds in the world had killed The Lich King. I’m sure that number is higher in 10 mans, artificially inflated by the swarm of 25 man guilds that ran multiples of 10 mans, on mains and alts, to get practice in for their 25 mans; but I doubt the number is much higher if you look at the strict 10 man progress.

I guess what baffles me is that Blizzard apparently considers 15 guilds a “significant number”. Actually, my guess is that they don’t really consider that number to be significant at all and would have preferred to keep the limited attempts much longer. My guess is that they had an issue having the attempt counter differentiate between normal and hard mode attempts, and it wasn’t “working as intended” which would cause issues for guilds that wanted to work hard modes, and clear the zone each week. Ultimately, I think the limited attempts were removed because of a programming problem that Blizzard couldn’t resolve, or perhaps thought they had more time to resolve. Again, this is just my speculation going here, so don’t take anything for gospel! It’s just what I think.

My Thoughts on The Removal of Attempts

Thank. Fucking. Christ.

I have disliked the limited attempt mechanic since it was first introduced. I think that it was a poor way for Blizzard to artificially extend the life of content. But that isn’t even the biggest reason that I disliked them.

I did not think that it was Blizzard’s place to regulate how much time people spent in the game. While it has definitely shown that some folks will push to unhealthy limits to be “first” the majority of us do not. We do not need Mother Blizzard looking over our shoulder telling us when it’s time to stop and go to bed. The majority of people playing the game do so in moderation, it was unfair to “punish” those folks to try and regulate the minority.

They caused un-needed stress for raiding guilds. (I think this was my number one reason I disliked them). Hey, everyone is human. People fuck up, it happens. Even the best players have bad nights (hell, our last putricide attempts I ate 9 goos throughout the course of the night). I think that a positive, constructive atmosphere is a much better place to raid than somewhere everyone is on pins and needles all night. Limited attempts put additional stress on everyone to be “perfect” or waste the guild’s efforts. If someone screwed up, even if it was the first time that person ever screwed up, they potentially wasted the attempt….and then felt like shit about it. Not only that, but it caused everyone else in the raid to jump harshly on people who screwed up. It sucked. It was not a fun raid environment.

Blizzard’s shit was bugged. We lost our entire first week’s worth of Putricide attempts as a result of Blizzard’s bugged content. It was unfair…and there wasn’t a single thing we could do about it. We just had to shrug it off and say “better luck next week”. Hell, we lost progression on Anub when his floor wouldn’t drop the week he was released, and had our BQL fail to spawn. These are not even close to isolated incidents. Having limited attempts on content that isn’t properly QA tested is unfair to those that are expected to perform within those attempts.

Disconnects and Lag happen. Another factor that is frequently out of anyone’s control, but often caused people to “waste” attempts. People disconnect. It happens. And I am sure that we are all familiar with that giant lag spike where the entire raid goes “um….”. These uncontrollable factors, sometimes as the result of Blizzard’s servers, are more reason why “limiting” was unfair.

We are not a guild that competes for world firsts. We are not a guild that would have stayed up until 3AM just to beat someone else to a kill. Hell, it will probably still be a few weeks before we can hang Arthas’ head to our wall, limited attempts or not. We have our strengths and weaknesses, and for us the limited attempt mechanic just added stress to our raid environment that didn’t need to be there, and quite frankly probably caused more poor performance from nervous people than we might have seen otherwise. It certainly caused a fair number of folks, myself included, stress. I am 100% glad that they are gone. Then again, I didn’t think they should have been there in the first place.

15 responses to “On Limited Attempts (or lack thereof!)”

We lag, we DC, we get bugs, and we loose attempts. Someone insists they can be ressed without aggroing the boss, and we loose an attempt. People grumble about each others’ lag and sit themselves out because they might possibly maybe disconnect or crash and loose an attempt. We run out of content because of limited attempts and sit around twiddling our thumbs for a raid night not wanting to have to go back to Ulduar AGAIN.

Remember Immortal? Worse, Immortal just prior to them removing the drakes?

STRESSSTRESSSTRESSSTRESSSTRESS

Nobody make a wrong move. Don’t blink. Don’t BREATHE.

Honestly, I was always pretty glad when someone died early so I could relax.

And it was the same with limited attempts.. it was almost a relief when we used them all up, so I no longer had to stress about how many we had left.

Immortal always put so much pressure on the raid, and then made people feel like garbage if they messed up. Same deal with limited attempts – even if it was something out of their control, like lag or DCs. Why add more stress and more bad feelings?

And I was getting tired of missing out on doing the other shared bosses while we worked on something new. Imagine missing out on all that loot every week that you wanted to try one of the end bosses on hard mode.. yuck.

I’m sad to see our head start go.. but I’m not sad to wave goodbye to that added pressure.

Immortal achievements were awful. Much worse than limited attempts I think. At least you get a number of attempts. One screw-up (or disconnect) is all it took to completely ruin an otherwise perfect Immortal run.

The first time my guild seriously went for the Immortal achievement in Naxx-25, we made it all the way up to KT and then I was the one who died. :( Looking back, there wasn’t a whole lot I could have done about it, people got MC’d and immediately started firing on the raid’s aggro-magnet tree. Add in a frostbolt volley from KT at that moment and you have one dead druid. I spent the next three days fretting about it, asking myself why I didn’t have a healthstone, or why I had already used a mana pot and couldn’t take a health pot, or wishing I had moved/healed/cc’d faster. Not fun.

I actually didn’t mind the limited attempts. Although I thought 10 at the beginning was too few. I can totally understand why most other people hated them, but sometimes it’s nice to put a limit on things. That way you knew, we have 15 attempts on Putricide and then our raid is done. Sometimes known endpoints are nice. But maybe that’s just a slight tinge of burnout talking.

Honestly, I think that the limited attempts on normal mode were always intended as a method of preventing a large number of guilds from finishing content too early.

Blizzard has been very emphatic about how they want EVERYONE to be able to see the various raid content. We had a hard time managing our raid comp and keeping the same group in that had already spent time learning the encounter and we run with a small group of people. I can’t imagine being a very large guild with no attendance obligations trying to do the limited attempts bosses when you’re continually having to train new people to the fights.

“Limited Attempts” to meter content is a failed experiment: the hardest of hardcore guilds simply ran second or third full raids on fully geared alts, and thus aren’t really limited at all. Already many of the best guilds *require* alts and attendance at the 2nd raid, expect this trend to increase if Blizzard continues to use this gimmick.

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